A fantastic several days at the AAG meeting in Boston! Glad to see so many old friends and meet many new ones. I presented a work in progress entitled: "Critical reflexivity, contradictions, and an evolving politics of resourcefulness: Reflections on community-engagement when teaching about food justice” in a session called "Publics, Pedagogies, and Praxis: Engaged Research and Scholarship in Critical Geography" organized by Tracey Osborne at the University of Arizona and Joel Correia at Colorado, and moderated by Lucy Jarosz at Washington. Here's the abstract:

Reflecting on the five-year evolution of an undergraduate capstone course on urban agriculture and food systems, I examine the importance of critical reflexivity when engaging in a “politics of resourcefulness” (Derickson and Routledge 2015). My students and I collaborated with two quite different organizations over the course’s lifespan: a community-based gardening collective that operates more than a dozen gardens in a gentrifying part of Portland, Oregon, and a much larger, more conventional non-profit focused on constructing backyard gardens for low-income residents where many of those displaced by gentrification now live. I discuss the epistemological and pedagogical role of critical reflexivity – that of my students, community partners, and my own – in opening the door to better understanding of urban agriculture’s contradictions and more critical contributions to the food justice efforts of our community partners. Our successes, I argue, hinged on engaging explicitly with racism as it articulates through common approaches to community development, agrarian imaginaries, notions of healthy food, and ahistorical understandings of neighborhood change. I also observe how some of the challenges of heeding the call to “expose, propose, politicize” (Marcuse 2009) within the constraints of a ten-week term can be overcome by engaging with a single organization over several years.